I am, to some extent, a rock critic and have been since it was "Anarchy in the UK" versus "Dancing Queen", and the albums of the year were, more or less, The Modern Lovers, Ramones, Station to Station, Blondie, Songs in the Key of Life, La Düsseldorf, Desire, Super Ape and Radio Ethiopia. Plus, according to taste, Kenny Wheeler's Gnu High, Sun Ra's Cosmos and Louis Adriessen's De Staat, or Eagles, Frampton, ELO and Queen.

I should by now be very used to people asking me what I'm listening to at the moment, what's new, what do I recommend and, at the very least, should be prepared. I've asked for it, really, with lists like that above. Harlem, Tune-Yards, Serena-Maneesh, I could say, or Leif Vollebekk, Andreya Triana, Junip. I could act as if everything falls into a tidy hierarchical place like it seemed to in 1976 and say Ariel Pink, the Bird and the Bee, Four Tet, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beach House, Flying Lotus, or just accept that what I should be saying as a mature, responsible consumer guide is Newsom, Chip, LCD, the National, Delphic etc etc.

I could simply explain that of this year's releases the ones I've played the most have been Evan Parker's Whitstable Solo, Travis and Fripp's Live at Coventry Cathedral, Paul Motian's Lost in a Dream, Pantha du Prince's Black Noise, Autechre's Oversteps, Jóhann Jóhannsson's And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees, These New Puritans's Hidden.

In the end, and if I've done this to you recently I apologise, I tend to go mute and stand awkwardly, like a 21-year-old rock critic, loud-mouthed on paper only, concerned that I might recommend something that will cause whoever I am talking to offence.

At this time of the year, once all that "what are you listening to?" stuff is out of the way, and I've apologised for somehow forgetting Polar Bear, Lonelady and – fucking hell – Fuck Buttons, there's a follow-up question: are you going to Glastonbury? The assumption is that of course I am, because I am a rock critic, and not to go is like not going to Wimbledon if you are a tennis writer or missing the Grand National as a racing correspondent. Actually, I've never been to Glastonbury, not even when New Order and the Smiths were playing there in the early 80s, helping to update its frayed hippie image and preparing the way for its current position as post-indie arbiter of where, pop musically, things are, if you don't think about it too much.

For a good decade and a half, my glib explanation has been that I don't go because I like music. From what I can tell, you go to Glastonbury more to belong, to be part of the crowd, to be social, to have the experience, to go on a journey, to jump on bandwagons, to fall off fences, to battle the elements, to play at adventure, to share something with thousands of strangers that is part ordeal, part discovery and part revelation. For someone weaned on the idea that music, whether big pop, avant-fun or dark cult, was made for me alone, for my thoughts and my feelings, this mass gathering seems oddly unnerving, although perhaps it's part of a wider allergy towards the current mass craze for the eager sharing of information, secrets and allegiances, which, after all, was once just the territory of the rock writer, the ultimate self-centred thinker.

As Glastonbury has increasingly become an integral part of the music season, I've got more and more grumpy and paralysed about it. I don't see free-thinking spirit rooted in shifting, subversive notions of liberation, invention and resistance, but a family-friendly, media-sponsored example of crowds of people from across the generations all doing the same thing under the guise of doing something different. It's a controlled, obedient, iRock-era parody of the very idea of abandoning inhibitions and conformity. In fact, this sort of experience is conformity itself, masked with packaged wildness, a sign that what we've gained since, say 1976, is a lot more fantastic music and general liberalism, a ton of trends, some of them mind-bending, and what we've lost is closely related to what it all means and how it might, you know, change the world, and challenge it, rather than keep more or less everyone amused and in their place.

Photographer Venetia Dearden was born close to the Glastonbury site and for her, there's a sense of wonder that this temporary settlement appears near-annually, bringing with it love, personality, exotic history, inspiring fortitude and sheer, marvellous exuberance. She sees it as an open-ended work of art represented by the various migrants, witnesses and participants passing through and leaving traces of themselves.

Her recently published photo-love story, Glastonbury: Another Stage (Kehrer Verlag, £29.99), contains more than 200 intimate portraits of visitors, artists and workers at the festival taken in a temporary white studio over the past six years, alongside dramatic shots of the farm, fields and trees. I can see both why I've never been tempted to go – the mud, the jollity, the costumes, the tents, the rituals, the high jinks, the face paint, the lavatories, the whimsy – but also that I've been missing out on something that might be as beautiful as it is adulterated, as genuinely surreal as it is everyday, in a world of its own beyond the obvious music, fun and mess.

Alongside Julien Temple's film of Glastonbury, it makes me think that for all my prejudices and anxieties, rooted ultimately in the fear of joining things, and becoming a mere number, it is time for me to go. It is time for me to answer the question: "Are you going to Glastonbury?" with the apparently correct answer. Yes. Of course I am. I'm a rock critic! Just don't ask me who I'm looking forward to seeing, as I might forget the name Gorillaz.